Sitting in a suite on the 28th floor of the Trump Hotel during this month’s TIFF, writer Alex Garland and star Karl Urban can’t ignore how different it is from the setting their film Dredd 3D.

Their film is set in Peach Tree Towers, a 200-storey slum that features Urban as the helmeted, future cop battling drug dealers on his way to freedom. Their current surroundings are considerably nicer than the story’s much grimier setting.

“If you say the wrong thing, he’ll chuck you through the window. And that’ll be that,” says Garland.

“Judgment,” Urban adds in his gruff character’s voice.

Dredd 3D is a grim and gritty reboot of the famed British comics character that wipes the slate clean from the cartoonish, forgettable Sylvester Stallone film from 1995. It tells a tale of a Dredd much closer to the brutal, violent comic series whose stories started being printed in the weekly anthology series 2000 A.D. Both Garland, the writer whose credits include The Beach and 28 Days Later, and Urban said they were fans of the original work and that they didn’t bother watching the original, as they wanted to keep much closer to the comic’s vision.

One of the keys to that was the decision that Urban wouldn’t ever take the famous character’s helmet off, something that some actors might bristle at.

“No, I didn’t. That’s the character, I knew it was it was going to be a challenge,” says Urban.

“You had the opposite of qualms, he said he wouldn’t do it,” says Garland.

“That’s true. We had a meeting in L.A. where I basically said that. I think they wanted a little bit of reassurance that we didn’t get halfway through and I started demanding scenes with the helmet off. And I said, unequivocally, I wouldn’t be here if I had read a script and came to scenes with his helmet off. I think that gave them the reassurance, because a couple of days later, they called up and said ‘the job’s yours.’”

In some ways, it’s a simple action movie, eschewing telling the main character’s origin story, instead showing a day in the life of Dredd as he takes out rookie judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) on the beat.

That beat is set in Mega-City One, the remaining sprawling North American city, that Garland said should almost be considered a character.

“I felt that part of the challenge with Mega-City One is to not make it feel like another world, but to make it feel like an extension of our world, that within the huge cities that most of us live, you can find the problems that Mega-City One has writ large,” he says. “You can find them. There’s a certain kind of urban threat and paranoia and also wish fulfillment, that someone like Dredd would come in and sort it out.”

It’s another genre-related piece for Urban, who previously had appeared in the Lord of the Rings, and is set to reprise his role as Leonard “Bones” McCoy in the oncoming Star Trek into Darkness. Urban isn’t afraid of being typecast as a genre star.

“No, no fear of that whatsoever. Perhaps it’s because I don’t really plan or strategize my career like some Hollywood actors; I simply respond to the material that’s in front of me,” he says. “I’ve done a bunch of films that aren’t science fiction or fantasy films, so I don’t feel particularly cornered in any way.”

Garland says that this film was structured similar to an independent film, and it’s only if it does well, then the team behind it may consider a sequel.

“It’s not a studio film, in that respect,” he says. “There was no they, it was us. If we generate enough money from this film, we can construct an argument to say it is worth your while investing in this, so we can do another one.”

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